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As I walked around in the backyard looking for cool insects, or sat in my room drawing pictures, the idea of going to the school prom never even crossed my mind. I can honestly say I felt no desire to go to stuff like that, or to parties. I was on the Cross Country team, which I guess is a geeky sport. My grades, though, were not the grades of a nerd. They were all over the place.
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"Then she showed me how the boogie board works. It was promisingly simple in principle. As a wave passed, she would leap aboard and skim along on its crest for many yards. Then Glenn had a turn and went even farther. There is no question that it looked like fun. It didn't look too hard either. I was tentatively eager to have a try.
I positioned myself for the first wave, then jumped aboard and sank like an anvil.
'How'd you do that?' asked Glenn in wonder.
'No idea.'
I repeated the exercise with the same result.
'Amazing,' he said.
There followed a half hour in which the two of them watched first with guarded amusement, then a kind of astonishment, and finally something not unlike pity, as I repeatedly vanished beneath the waves and was scraped over an area of ocean floor roughly the size of Polk County, Iowa."
Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country"
